Lecture 2. Morphological structure of the word

2.1. Morphology: definition.

The notion of morpheme.

Morphology (Gr. morphe – form, and logos – word) is a branch of grammar that concerns itself with the internal structure of words and peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics.

The study of Modern English morphology consists of four main items,

(1) general study of morphemes and types of word-form derivation,

(2) the system of parts of speech,

(3) the study of each separate part of speech, the grammatical categories connected with it, and its syntactical functions.

The morpheme may be defined as an elementary meaningful segmental component of the word. It is built up by phonemes and is indivisible into smaller segments as regards its significative function.

Example:

writers can be divided into three morphemes:

(1) writ-, expressing the basic lexical meaning of the word,

(2) -er-, expressing the idea of agent performing the action indicated by the root of the verb,

(3) -s, indicating number, that is, showing that more than one person of the type indicated is meant.

Two or more morphemes may sound the same but be basically different, that is, they may be homonyms. Thus the -er morpheme indicating the doer of an action as in writer has a homonym — the morpheme -er denoting the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, as in longer.

There may be zero morphemes, that is, the absence of a morpheme may indicate a certain meaning. Thus, if we compare the words book and books, both derived from the stem book-, we may say that while books is characterised by the –s morpheme indicating a plural form, book is characterised by the zero morpheme indicating a singular form.

Traditional classification of morphemes is based on the two basic criteria:

1. positional – the location of the marginal morphemes (периферийные морфемы) in relation to the central ones (центральные морфемы)

2. semantic/functional – the correlative contribution (соотносительный вклад) of the morphemes to the general meaning of the word.

According to this classification, morphemes are divided into:

1. root-morphemes (roots) – express the concrete, ‘material’ (насыщенная конкретным содержанием, вещественная) part of the meaning of the word.

The roots of notional words are classical lexical morphemes.

2. affixal morphemes (affixes) – express the specificational (спецификационная) part of the meaning of the word.

This specification can have lexico-semantic (лексическая) and grammatico-semantic (грамматическая) character.

The affixal morphemes include:

1) prefixes

2) suffixes

Prefixes and lexical suffixes have word-building functions, and form the stem of the word together with the root.

3) inflexions (флексия)/grammatical suffix (Blokh)

The morpheme serves to derive a grammatical form; it has no lexical meaning of its own and expresses different morphological categories.

The abstract complete morphemic model of the common English word is the following: prefix + root + lexical suffix + inflection/grammatical suffix.